Egypt in a dangerous crossroads

Egypt is undergoing a serious economic, social, political, military, and diplomatic crisis. Egypt has a larger population than Iran, but its economy is smaller, and it is a country with a not negligible geostrategic importance because of its location between Africa and Asia.

Currently Egypt is not able to feed properly its population, neither to provide it with enough employment. It is estimated that some 35 – 40% of Egypt's population is earning less than the equivalent of two dollars a day. Egypt has a population of over 90 million, and whilst the official figures for unemployment are of 27%, estimates put the number at a minimum of 40%. Recently the government devaluated the Egyptian pound by nearly half of its value. A veteran writer on Egyptian affairs has described last month the situation of the sugar deliverances as follows: “Sugar supplies have dwindled. Supermarkets and shops have run out, long queues are forming outside government cooperatives, and prices have doubled over the last few weeks. The state-owned Food Industries Holding Company has been reduced to rationing meagre sugar supplies to the food processing industry, especially soft drink makers, to keep factories running.” (cfr. http://www.thenational.ae/business/economy/patrick-werr-sugar-shortage-in-egypt-leaves-a-bitter-taste#full)  Tourism, another key factor in the Egyptian economy, is also under a severe crisis due that because of security concerns England canceled its flights to Sharm el-Sheikh and Russia canceled altogether its flights to Egypt.

Politically, Egypt’s power elite is divided between on one side President al-Sissi, backed by the Central Intelligence, and on the other the Armed Forces and the Military Intelligence. There seems to be no danger currently of another coup, because the fear of total political and economic collapse enhance the preference for a smooth leadership transition in the next few years. It is within this framework that we must see the call of some army officials to al-Sissi not to run for reelection in 2018.

The national security is challenged by the extremist armed actions in the Sinai Peninsula, in especial the Islamic State group. The army is having difficulty to cleanse the area due to its mountainous character and the presence of some highly trained terrorist insiders among Bedouin tribes who are difficult to track down.

If all this wasn’t enough, things got worse with the Cairo rejection of participating in the Saudi-led coalition battering the Shiite Houthis and their vote for a Russian resolution on Syria. As a result, last month Saudi Aramco decided to stop the transfer of discounted oil to Egypt.

In spite of everything, Egypt is still considered a leading power in the Arab world. The eyes are put now in the new incoming administration in Washington, to see if and how it will help Egypt, or if it will keep the retreatment path of the Obama policy. Trump will have to understand that the price of isolationism is the enhancement of the danger of pushing Egypt into Russian or Iranian arms.

Ethnic cleansing in the current war

The Middle East war is causing gigantic demographic changes, in a proportion than can be compared to the massive expulsion of ethnically Germans from East Europe at the aftermath of World War Two or the formidable population exchange between Indians and Pakistanis. Interestingly the latter was not done on historic or linguistic lines, but were implemented on religious lines, in the same vein that the main source of tension in the Middle East today runs in the lanes of the Sunni-Shia confrontation. The religious variable has shown much wider influence than what we thought during the Cold War years. The large-scale population movements originated in the region have not been a simple byproduct of war. Rather, they represent conscious strategies of ethnic cleansing by each faction. Already last year, Fabrice Balanche, of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that “the Syrian conflict is a sectarian war, and ethnic cleansing is an integral part of the strategy used by various actors, even if they claim otherwise.” (http://www.businessinsider.com/these-maps-show-how-ethnic-cleansing-has-become-a-weapon-in-syrias-civil-war-2015-12).

Before the inner war in Syria began in 2011, the Sunni Muslims make up about three quarters of the Syrian population, whilst the Shia Muslims were only some 11-13%. This was a problem for the nepotistic Alawite regime, and their Iranian and Russian allies. The war soon brought up the issue of the destruction of the sheltering populations, and the depopulation and ethnic cleansing of rebel-held areas was incremented. More than a million Sunni Syrians have gone to Europe, and some four million are refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Shiites have come to Syria from Iraq, Iran, and other countries. Another aspect, is the redistribution by the Damascus regime of land and houses that belonged to Arab Sunnis who relocated to other places to remaining Arab Sunnis, and so increasing their dependence on the official authorities and arising conflict with anyone who decides to return.

The ethnic cleansing is a rising phenomenon both in Syria and Iraq. And if the main confrontation trench is the Sunni-Shia one, Christians are disappearing in both countries. But the latter is not something new. It is useful to recall that even after the Arab conquests of the Middle East in the 7th century, the majority of the population in most cases was still Christian. Yet the number of Christians steadily declined over the centuries that followed. A century ago, Christians represented some 20 percent of the population of the Middle East; today, that figure is estimated at less than 4 percent. It has been estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of Middle Eastern Christians have either been killed or left the area over the last century.

Of course nobody knows what is going to happen in the Middle Eastern quicksands, but it seems safe to acknowledge that the region will not return to its previous configurations. The Sykes-Picot designs seem to have failed, but consensus on lines of solution seem scarce. The current battle in Mosul, which is already causing thousands of refugees, is also dangerously arising the mutual suspicions and tensions between the Sunni Turkey and the Shia-dominated Iraq. The Turkish military are deploying heavy armor, including tanks, to the border near Iraq, a step to which Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi menaced with nothing less than stating in a televised news conference that “the invasion of Iraq will lead to Turkey being dismantled”. In the current dangerous Middle East everything is suspicion and tension in the best case, war in the worst.